If energy needs to be saved, there are good ways
to do it.
Government product regulation is not one of them

Thursday, June 30, 2011

And Pennsylvania: Local repeal bill under way...

As communicated by the office of Pennsylvania House Rep. Matt Gabler, he and Rep. Matt Baker are currently looking for co-sponsors for a bill to locally repeal federal light bulb legislation, becoming the 7th state to seek to do so (see updates regarding other US state bills).

In the first instance they seek to
"memorialize Congress to make necessary mandate repeals before the light bulb related provisions of the Energy Independence and Security Act takes effect"

However, to ensure as far as possible the continuation of local manufacturing and freedom of choice for local consumers, a local repeal ban bill will also be launched.

Comment
As mentioned on the Michigan launch post, state legislators are aware of the inter-state commerce law and seeking to defend the rights of intra-state commerce.
Clearly, out-of-state visitors would come and buy these bulbs, but that is still hardly inter-state commerce unless they then re-sell them locally in other states.
That said, since regular incandescent light bulbs are small, cheap, and weigh little,
federal regulators are clearly going to see intended regulation effects circumvented.
The vigor with which they choose to pursue local state legislation may also be influenced by the Canadian Government proposal to delay a ban implementation to 2014,
also because alternative local state US purchases would benefit the US economy more
(remembering that around 2 billion incandescent light bulbs are annually sold in the USA
on 2008-2009 figures)

The second point here is that Pennsylvania, like South Carolina, and unlike say Texas,
already has current incandescent manufacturing at the Osram-Sylvania factory in St Marys (of which Matt Gabler is the State House representative).

The Sylvania site states that the factory
"manufactures nearly 2 million incandescent light bulbs each day, in 1,700 varieties and packages"
Attempts to safeguard some of the 265 jobs involve a conversion to making Halogen type less energy using incandescents - but these are far more expensive and less popular than regular simple incandescents, giving much lower sales versus more energy saving CFLs or LEDs (which of course is the ban intention), and, as set out on http://ceolas.net/#li01inx, all known incandescents will be banned by 2020 anyway: All of which hardly saves those jobs.
On the contrary, the continued sales of cheap bulbs would likely give more local jobs,
with all the extra purchases from out-of state visitors too.

Of further note is that the only Democrat in the US Congress sponsoring any of the federal light bulb ban repeals is Pennsylvania Rep. Tim Holden, alongside Republican Reps Tim Murphy and Glenn Thompson (St Marys District) and Senator Patrick Toomey.